Freelance writer and author of "Bumped" and "Baby Modeling & Beyond: From the Stroller to the Red Carpet."

09/02/2014

This sounds like fun! If you've had one of those a-ha moments and want to share it, Real Simple has an essay contest for you. The grand prize is $3,000 (enough to make a few more moments).

From their site:

Have you ever had a eureka moment? Tell us about it.

Think back on the instant when everything became clear. The split second when you realized that you had chosen the right career. Or the moment when you knew that your dearest friendship would last forever. Whether your epiphany changed your life or just made your day, write it down and share it with us.

Enter Real Simple’s seventh annual Life Lessons Essay Contest and you could have your essay published in Real Simple and receive a prize of $3,000.

Send your typed, double-spaced submission (1,500 words maximum, preferably in a Microsoft Word document) to lifelessons@realsimple.com. Contest begins at 12:01 A.M. EST on May 9, 2014, and runs through 11:50 P.M. EST on September 18, 2014. All submitted essays must be nonfiction. Open to legal residents of the United States age 19 or older at time of entry. Void where prohibited by law. (Entries will not be returned.)

08/23/2014

Guggenheim Fellowships of approximately $50,000 each are awarded annually to poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers on the basis of achievement and exceptional promise. Residents of the United States and Canada are eligible. Using the online submission system, submit a career summary, a list of publications, contact information for up to four references, and a statement of intent by September 19, 2014. Upon request of the foundation, submit up to three published books by November 14. There is no entry fee. Visit the website for the required entry form and complete guidelines.

08/17/2014

Calling all mystery writers! Here's a great competition for first mystery novels. Winner receives a contract and $10,000 advance. Deadline is October 15, 2014.

The mansucript entered must not be under contract or self-published. It must also be at least 40,000 words. Here are some guidelines from the site:

Murder or another serious crime or crimes is at the heart of the story. Whatever violence is necessarily involved should be neither excessive nor gratuitously detailed, nor is there to be explicit sex. The suspects and the victims should know each other. There are a limited number of suspects, each of whom has a credible motive and reasonable opportunity to have committed the crime. The person who solves the crime is the central character. The “detective” is an amateur, or, if a professional (private investigator, police officer) is not hardboiled and is as fully developed as the other characters. The detective may find him or herself in serious peril, but he or she does not get beaten up to any serious extent. All of the cast represent themselves as individuals, rather than large impersonal institutions like a national government, the mafia, the CIA, etc.

To enter and see the complete rules and guidlines, click here. Good luck!

08/06/2014

There's still time left to submit to Lee & Low's New Voices Award. Deadline's September 30 (snail mail so make sure you get that postmark in). The winner will receive a cash prize of $1000 and a standard publication contract, including a basic advance and royalties for a first time author. An Honor Award winner will receive a cash prize of $500. The Award and/or Honor Award winners will be notified no later than December 31, 2014.

Writers of color should submit manuscripts that address the needs of children of color by providing stories with which they can identify and relate, and which promote a greater understanding of one another.

This can be a work of FICTION, NONFICTION, or POETRY for children ages 5 to 12. Folklore and animal stories will not be considered. Manuscripts should be no more than 1500 words in length and accompanied by a cover letter that includes the author’s name, address, phone number, email address, brief biographical note, relevant cultural and ethnic information, how the author heard about the award, and publication history, if any.

This sounds like a wonderful grant! Plenty of time to submit too, so hop on it if it applies to you.

The Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship for artists of color and Indigenous artists provides writers financial support and professional assistance to develop and implement self-selecting community learning and enrichment plans. Winners will be selected to receive grants of $7,500 to underwrite projects of their own design. At least one winner will be a Minnesota resident. The total number of winners will be dependent on the requests. Go here to apply.

08/05/2014

Hard to believe it, but we are more than halfway through the year. If you feel like you're no closer to reaching your goals of publishing or writing, maybe you just need a little inspiration or guidance? Here are a few FREE Kindle books on writing and publishing. Post your favorites in the comments section below. Enjoy!

07/30/2014

So I'm still learning my way around Scrivener (which is an amazing tool to organize your writing, both fiction and non-fiction). I'm probably using about 10% of it's ability, just like my brain. I seem to spend more time on the 'net learning how to do things with it when I probably should just find a tutorial and watch it.

Anyhoo, I wanted to create a timeline for my work in progress. It's a mystery/thriller and I need to be able to track my events or else I'm going to end up with eight days in a week and 38 hours in a day. I looked at Aeon Timeline and after having it crash on me twice (I downloaded the free trial), I decided it probably wasn't right for me. It's also a little more complex than I need it to be.

I read a post online on a way to create a calendar by making a table. I'm not lazy or anything but my calendar didn't look that great and it was taking me longer to create it than I wanted.

Instead I went over to Google because I love their calendar, created a new one for my character. I inserted events from my story and then I saved it as a pdf and was going to import it into my binder. Then I saw the option to import a webpage and lo' and behond, I was able to import my Google calendar into Scrivener. While it's not perfect it does offer more flexibility than a pdf.

It opens to today's date whenever I go into that file, no biggie. I haven't figured out how to size it correctly, so it's a little small. It gets the job done though. I am able to add events, go backwards and forwards in time, etc. I have the full capability of Google Calendar in my Scrivner project. Yessss!

Here's how to do it:

Create a folder, I called mine Timeline and then hit the + sign to create a new document. Go to File>Import>Webpage

Drop in the url for the Google Calendar you created and you are good to go.

How do you keep track of your timeline in Scrivener? I'd love to hear about in the comments below.

07/24/2014

If you're looking to put some serious work into improving on the craft of writing, DIY MFA has a great challenge coming up in August called Conquer the Draft.

From August 1-29 they will email you one prompt per day, then finish off the month with a 2-day virtual writing retreat.

What really makes it interesting is that they've designed a series of writing exercises not just to inspire you and get your creativity going, but also to help improve your writing. Each prompt targets a specific technique or element of craft so that by the end of the month, hopefully not only will you be writing more but you'll be writing better.

07/21/2014

They say book marketing tends to be more like a marathon than a sprint. For me, it feels like an around the world journey on foot with multiple maps. You plod along and change course when needed. The thing is you have to keep moving.

Right now, I'm throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks. I enrolled Bumped back into KDP (it'll be exclusively sold on Amazon for three months) so I could run a free promotion to reinvigorate interest. Mark Coker of Smashwords says the latest results from his Smashwords survey show that free is losing its luster because everyone is doing it. And it's true.

"Free remains one of the most powerful book marketing tools because it makes it easier for readers to take a risk on an author brand that is unknown or untrusted. Free ebooks, according to our data derived from iBooks downloads, generated 39 times more downloads on average during our survey period than books at any price. Yet the effectiveness of free is down dramatically compared to our 2013 (91X) and 2012 (100X) survey results. While there is still much untapped greenfield opportunity for indies to leverage free, I expect the effectiveness of free will continue to decline as more authors learn to take advantage of it. If you've never utilized free, now's the time to do so before your window of maximum opportunity closes further."

Over the course of 5 days, I received almost 3,000 downloads and hit #3 on Amazon's Free category under Women's Fiction (whoo! hoo!). Based on my last free promotion, I knew the bump (no pun in intended, well, maybe a little) in sales would be questionable because the second the promotion ended, my rankings plummeted back to it's pre-promotion nosebleed levels.

Reviews are the online version of word-of-mouth that keeps your book alive. Not to mention, you also need a certain number of reviews to even place your book on some paid sites during promotional periods. Speaking of which, I submitted my book to a variety of sites to post my Kindle free days. That was hit or miss. Some sites are better than others, some charge and some just plain don't exist anymore. I worked from this list to submit my book.

I also posted chapters of Bumped on Wattpad and mentioned the free promotion at the end of the chapter and I think that helped as well. I'm almost at 10,000 reads and hope to keep that number growing.

The long and short of the free promotion is this, you have to be willing to take your book off all other platforms for at least three months if you want to offer your book free through Amazon's KDP Select program. Is it worth it? Probably more so for those with series because you can hook people on your first book and if they like it, they'll be willing to pay for the remaining books. Standalone books face a steeper road uphill but the additional reviews do pay off in the long run. At the end day, it's another tool to get your work out there in front of new readers and build your audience.